Hello, fellow aquarists,
Decided to start a thread about my tanks - all the information and updates from time to time will go here. The main one is 247.5 litres / ~65 gallons and 2 others are 30 litres / ~8 gallons each (more like a farms for predator tank)
To begin with and make things a little interesting, here are few shots of the main tank:
It's not the usual type of aquascape, where you get everything in the middle with a lot of space on all sides or something at the back of the tank and a lot of space in the front. The reason behind this is simple - the main tank can be viewed from all sides since it's a "room-dividing" tank (my workplace corner / rest of the living room). Also I'm interested in predatory fish, however they enjoy hiding in the daylight and having fun at night. To prevent not seeing them, I decided to make few huge caves from both sides, where you can see it from the inside too. The first picture with Erpechtoithys calabaricus's head and bamboo shrimp shows the "outside view" of one of the caves and the picture below shows inside: (due to different times of photo, calabaricus was already somewhere else...)
Overall info of the main tank:
Dimensions: 100 cm (39.37 inch) x 45 cm (17.72 inch) x 55 cm (21.65 inch). Glass lid. Egg crate on bottom.
Equipment:
Eheim 2217 external canister filter: prefilter sponge (seen in photos), inside: 1 coarse, 1 medium, 1 fine sponge; 1 bags of seachem matrix (1 litre each, 2 litres total), carbon filter pad. Both inlet and outlet are DIY: the outlet flute has holes in different positions to maintain better water circulation and move the surface for oxigen. (In case of too low oxigen, will add an air pump).
Heater: inline Hydor 200w.
Ligthning: DIY 8 x 10w Cree XM-L2 U2. Adjustable light intensity with timer. (however, currently broken, but will be fixed in few days)
Substrate:
2 litres of ADA Power sand L; ~15 litres of ADA aquasoil Amazonia; ~1.8 litres ADA Colorado Sand.
Decorations:
Close to 50-70 kg of Seiryu stone, 5 bonsai trees (dried in oven and boiled)
Plants:
Micranthemum ‘Monte Carlo’, Anubias nana petite (nana nana, mini mini, bonsai – it’s the same), Bucephalandra ‘wavy green’, ‘deep purple’ – will add much more bucephalandras later, but the LFS doesn’t have any ATM. Same goes for 2 'trees', which currently are missing leaves
Beginning: Dry start carpet on bottom for ~1-1.5 months and anubias for ~2 weeks. After fill up had my lightning broken (already about 2 weeks, but LEDs are coming), rescaped one mountain to decrease the amount of caves (there were 3 huge caves and many small ones) and planted the spare monte carlo on the mountain with a hope that it will spread.
Temperature: 25 Celsius.
Situation:
2 large bamboo shrimps and ~6-7 little amano shrimps were having fun since yesterday, when I introduced first few stars of the tank: Polypterus Senegalus albino (~3inch/8cm) and 2 Erpechtoithys calabaricus (~8inch/20cm each).
My first idea was, that due to switching tanks from LFS to my tank with live plants they will slowly acclimate (even though, when I introduce new fishes, I usually do something similar to drip method for fish acclimatization) to the new environment and basically act like plecos (those who had them, will understand). However, after first few minutes in the tank they started to explore more and more caves and playing with the current from filter flute like they were living in the tank for quite some time.
Next morning (this morning), I decided that it's time to give them something to eat...at least if they want to and here came the next surprise. I read a lot, that polypterus ain't eating well when introduced to new tanks and calabaricus also having a problem...well.... polypterus took 5 seconds, calabricus - ~10-15s to locate and destroy bloodworms.
Funny things about shrimps. When I started to introduce predators to tank, amano shrimps quickly understood that they aren't the tank bosses anymore (besides bamboo shrimps, which more less keep their routine of standing and filtering the water in the best current-wise place) they jumped to trees and not going to monte-carlo grass anymore. Bamboo shrimps on the other hand, haven't changed their routine and even attacked calabaricus, who swam nearby.
Decided to start a thread about my tanks - all the information and updates from time to time will go here. The main one is 247.5 litres / ~65 gallons and 2 others are 30 litres / ~8 gallons each (more like a farms for predator tank)
To begin with and make things a little interesting, here are few shots of the main tank:
It's not the usual type of aquascape, where you get everything in the middle with a lot of space on all sides or something at the back of the tank and a lot of space in the front. The reason behind this is simple - the main tank can be viewed from all sides since it's a "room-dividing" tank (my workplace corner / rest of the living room). Also I'm interested in predatory fish, however they enjoy hiding in the daylight and having fun at night. To prevent not seeing them, I decided to make few huge caves from both sides, where you can see it from the inside too. The first picture with Erpechtoithys calabaricus's head and bamboo shrimp shows the "outside view" of one of the caves and the picture below shows inside: (due to different times of photo, calabaricus was already somewhere else...)
Overall info of the main tank:
Dimensions: 100 cm (39.37 inch) x 45 cm (17.72 inch) x 55 cm (21.65 inch). Glass lid. Egg crate on bottom.
Equipment:
Eheim 2217 external canister filter: prefilter sponge (seen in photos), inside: 1 coarse, 1 medium, 1 fine sponge; 1 bags of seachem matrix (1 litre each, 2 litres total), carbon filter pad. Both inlet and outlet are DIY: the outlet flute has holes in different positions to maintain better water circulation and move the surface for oxigen. (In case of too low oxigen, will add an air pump).
Heater: inline Hydor 200w.
Ligthning: DIY 8 x 10w Cree XM-L2 U2. Adjustable light intensity with timer. (however, currently broken, but will be fixed in few days)
Substrate:
2 litres of ADA Power sand L; ~15 litres of ADA aquasoil Amazonia; ~1.8 litres ADA Colorado Sand.
Decorations:
Close to 50-70 kg of Seiryu stone, 5 bonsai trees (dried in oven and boiled)
Plants:
Micranthemum ‘Monte Carlo’, Anubias nana petite (nana nana, mini mini, bonsai – it’s the same), Bucephalandra ‘wavy green’, ‘deep purple’ – will add much more bucephalandras later, but the LFS doesn’t have any ATM. Same goes for 2 'trees', which currently are missing leaves
Beginning: Dry start carpet on bottom for ~1-1.5 months and anubias for ~2 weeks. After fill up had my lightning broken (already about 2 weeks, but LEDs are coming), rescaped one mountain to decrease the amount of caves (there were 3 huge caves and many small ones) and planted the spare monte carlo on the mountain with a hope that it will spread.
Temperature: 25 Celsius.
Situation:
2 large bamboo shrimps and ~6-7 little amano shrimps were having fun since yesterday, when I introduced first few stars of the tank: Polypterus Senegalus albino (~3inch/8cm) and 2 Erpechtoithys calabaricus (~8inch/20cm each).
My first idea was, that due to switching tanks from LFS to my tank with live plants they will slowly acclimate (even though, when I introduce new fishes, I usually do something similar to drip method for fish acclimatization) to the new environment and basically act like plecos (those who had them, will understand). However, after first few minutes in the tank they started to explore more and more caves and playing with the current from filter flute like they were living in the tank for quite some time.
Next morning (this morning), I decided that it's time to give them something to eat...at least if they want to and here came the next surprise. I read a lot, that polypterus ain't eating well when introduced to new tanks and calabaricus also having a problem...well.... polypterus took 5 seconds, calabricus - ~10-15s to locate and destroy bloodworms.
Funny things about shrimps. When I started to introduce predators to tank, amano shrimps quickly understood that they aren't the tank bosses anymore (besides bamboo shrimps, which more less keep their routine of standing and filtering the water in the best current-wise place) they jumped to trees and not going to monte-carlo grass anymore. Bamboo shrimps on the other hand, haven't changed their routine and even attacked calabaricus, who swam nearby.
